Peace Country residents will have the opportunity to view pottery created by a local artist schooled in the art of Japanese pottery at a new art exhibition opening this month in Beaverlodge.
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The exhibit, called “High Fire,” can be viewed at the Beaverlodge Art and Culture Centre, from Oct. 31 to Nov. 25, and is mainly an exhibition of pottery created by artist Bibi Clement using a traditional Japanese Anagama kiln.
he exhibition will also feature pieces from Lane Borstad, retired GPRC art history teacher and friend of Clement.
“Bibi has been doing this for a lot of years and she really is a master craftsman, she’s quite revered in larger communities,” said Borstad.
Clement has lived in the Peace Region since 1993, and previously, she’s been a fashion designer, a filmmaker and clay artist in cities like Algiers, Paris and Vancouver.
Clement has been studying with Japanese pottery masters since 1997 and has built a following in Canada and Japan.
“She studied in Japan, she’s exhibited in Japan, she’s taught in Japan, and she’s had Japanese master potters come over to do workshops here in Hythe a few times,” said Borstad.
For decades Bibi’s hands have been creating fine high-fired ash-glazed and Raku pottery. Her collection will be exhibited in BACS’ Main Gallery October 31 until November 25.Photo by David McGregor
According to Borstad, this style of pottery originated in Korea and Japan and goes back hundreds of years. The pottery is built around the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi which celebrates the idea of impermanence.
“The idea that change is the constant, and the beauty of things lies in imperfection and incompleteness, it’s kind of a humble, modest thing,” said Borstad.
According to Borstad, Clement was one of the first people in Western Canada to have a full-scale Anagama kiln, and her work is in collections all over Western Canada.
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“Bibi’s aesthetic is about the artist producing a one of a kind of object and every one in her process is different,” said Borstad “Even when you have a set of dinnerware from her, every plate, every cup and every item in that [set] has a uniqueness to it.”
The process is created by adding wood to the kiln’s fire every 20-30 seconds, 24 hours a day, over three to five days.
The heat inside the kiln gets so intense the ash inside turns to glass which dribbles all over the pottery.
“It’s not something you can have absolute control over,” said Borstad, adding “that’s part of the Japanese aesthetic about nature, change and impermanence.”
Clement also injects salt into the kiln which creates an added texture to the pottery, and according to Borstad, he’s not aware of another potter in the north using this process.
“It creates this very special kind of beauty that you can’t get in a mechanical kiln,” said Borstad.
The colossal hand-built Anagama kiln sits on Bibi Clement’s rural property and is responsible for the naturally glazed, high-fired ceramics for which Clement is esteemed.Photo by David McGregor
Borstad met Clement 25 years ago when she was teaching student workshops at GPRC, but it was in retirement when Borstad cultivated a friendship with Clement and decided to pursue pottery further.
“I fell totally in love with her process of Anagama,” said Borstad.
Borstad will also be selling a special line of soup bowls he created with all proceeds going to the Beaverlodge Food Bank.
Entrance to the exhibit is free and the Beaverlodge Art and Culture Centre is open from Tuesday to Sunday.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
